E. Crispolti, Fontana: Catologo Generale, Milan, 1986, vol. II, p. 499, no. 64 B 3.
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana. Catalogo Ragionato di sculture, dipinti, ambientazioni, Milan, 2006, vol. II, p. 689, no. 64 B 3.
Maestri moderni e contemporanei. Antologica scelta 2008, exhibition catalogue, Tornabunoi Arte, Florence, 2007, p. 151.
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, exhibition catalogue, Tornabunoi Art, Paris, 2009, p. 151.
R. Diez, Lucio Fontana. Che il quadro esca dalla cornice!, Milan, 2009. pp. 110–11.
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With its exquisite golden surface perforated with a constellation of small gashes enclosed within a lightly inscribed oval, Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale unites three motifs essential to the artist’s visual language: the sun, the egg and the punctured hole. Three years prior to the present work’s creation, in 1961, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin pierced earth’s stratosphere to become the first human being to enter space. His galactic journey proved that existence is not limited by earthly dimensions but is ultimately located in spatial infinity. Even in a century replete with tectonic eruptions, this development was exceptional, and among the many masters of twentieth-century art, it was Fontana whose work best expressed its import. Like all truly great artists, he both revolutionised precedent and created a conceptual ideology whose new perspective simultaneously reflected and impacted on his own time. While Bacon looked inward to the turmoil of psychological and bodily existence and Warhol trained his eye on the exteriority obsessing product- and celebrity-centric modern culture, Fontana explored the spaces which surround human beings and define mankind’s desire to further the boundaries of existence. In the present work, the egg, the ultimate symbol of life, and gold, a potent signifier for prosperity, are together pierced by visceral ruptures that tear at the solidity of these fundamental concerns of humanity, and yet at the same time suggest endless possibilities.

For Fontana, gold was the colour of the sun, and just as its powerful rays penetrated the very universe, so too did Fontana’s revolutionary slashing gesture seek access the infinite dimensions beyond the canvas. Moreover, created in 1960, the work presages the artist’s Venice and New York series of the following year. Fontana was fascinated with gold and gilding, used throughout art history for the most sacred objects. Luxurious and luminous, the enigmatic and abstract nature of gold’s metallic reflections had long been associated with divinity and immortality. In Italy, gilding proliferated in the Byzantine and Baroque period, when it became omnipresent on countless architectural and decorative motifs, especially in churches. Fontana used gold paint across his later career. In his Venezia series of 1961, Fontana manipulated metallic paint into fluid impastos to dreamily recreate the dynamic undulations and arabesques of the Venetian Baroque; later, inspired by the skyscrapers of Manhattan after his first journey to New York in 1961, the artist jettisoned canvas for actual copper and aluminum sheets in a series entitled Metalli. Exploiting the reflective qualities his medium, in his Metalli, direct light upon the object rebounds toward the exterior, inundating the surrounding space, and the mirror surface distorts the reflection of the viewer in front of these impressive works. Thus, works like the present one mark a significant step on the artist’s journey towards perfecting a sense of an enveloping, phenomenological experience in the relationship between the viewer and the artwork.

Beginning in 1949, Fontana worked on a series he called buchi, in which he punctured and perforated his canvases with patterns of holes, disrupting the two-dimensionality of the flat surface and exposing the limitless space beyond the picture plane. During the summer and fall of 1958, Fontana pioneered what would become his signature gesture—the slash—developing the eponymous series called the tagli. Though eventually he would evolve his tagli into boldly monochrome canvases marked by large and forceful vertical slashes chiefly done in pairs, trios, and quartets, in his earliest efforts he opted for larger numbers of small vertical, horizontal, and diagonal gashes arranged in constellations that almost seem to coalesce into or be in the process of diffusing away from coherent forms, as he had already done with his buchi. The present work, pierced with cuts and holes somewhere in between buchi and tagli, betokens Fontana’s constant experimentation as he worked to rupture both the concept and object of painting to create a fully Spatialist art. Indeed, in both the buchi and the tagli, destruction and creation become one. Performed in decisive, theatrical, and irrevocable movements, the creative gesture instigating the slash forcefully breaks the traditional pictorial support and simultaneously opens up a new field of possibility in which invisible energetic forces collide in an inter-dimensional concetto spaziale (“spatial concept”), surrounded by an infinite void.

Indeed, the present work is moreover among the first made for an age that found itself thrust into the physical reality of the infinite abyss: space. Completed at the outset of the space race, the punctures here likewise invite viewers to travel to another realm. “When I hit the canvas,” Fontana explained, “I sensed that I had made an important gesture. It was, in fact, not an incidental hole, it was a conscious hole: by making a hole in the picture I found a new dimension in the void. By making holes in the picture I invented the fourth dimension” (quoted in Pia Gottschaller, Lucio Fontana: The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles, 2012, p. 21). Fontana’s shimmering gold surface is suggestive of the celestial skyscape while the enigmatic and eternal darkness beyond the holes evokes the mysterious chasm of space; at the same time, the arrangement of the holes recalls a constellation of stars or even a galaxy of planets, while the ruptured topography of the pictorial plane mirrors mankind’s efforts to shatter terrestrial constraints, thus capturing the inspiring sense of discovery that heralded an age of cosmic exploration. This Concetto Spaziale is at once gestural and astral, organic and futuristic, primal and revolutionary; just as man entered space, so Fontana transcended the canvas, and brought outer space itself into art.

Furthermore, the holes are contained within an inscribed ovoid form, or perhaps even a halo. At the very moment of the creation of the present work, the egg shape had become the defining motif of Fontana’s seminal series La Fine di Dio, begun in 1963. In addition to connoting new life and resurrection in both biological and religious contexts, and thus to the genesis of Fontana’s new art, the oval was also central to the artist’s understanding of the universe. In 1916, when Fontana was seventeen years old, Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, and in so doing permanently transformed modern science’s conception of space, time, and gravity. According to Einstein, matter causes space to curve; he also posited that gravity, in opposition to Newton’s law, is not a force, but is instead a curved field sculpted by the presence of mass. Paired with cosmologist (and Catholic priest) Georges Lemaître’s proposal of the expansion of the universe from an initial point in 1931, Einstein’s theorising of spacetime conceived a model of the universe that today takes the form of a three-dimensional ovoid. That Lemaître famously described his Big Bang theory in a scientific paper as “the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of creation” does much to underline the perspicacity of Fontana’s use of the egg shape in his canvases.

From a spiritual standpoint, in 1967 Fontana proclaimed that “God is invisible, God is incomprehensible; this is why no artist today can depict God seated on a throne with the world in his hands and a beard…The religions, too, must adapt themselves to the new state of science” (quoted in Barbara Hess, Lucio Fontana 1899–1968, Cologne, 2006, p. 68). Thus, the immanent orb that emerges from the surface of this Concetto Spaziale ultimately alludes to a profound existential reconfiguration of our understanding of the universe, the divine, and humankind’s meaning within it in the face of “the new state of science,” not bleakly atheistic in intent but offering a novel perspective for a modern age. On 19 June 1968, in the final interview before his death, Fontana affirmed the transcendent and humanist quality of his vision. “In 500 years’ time people will not talk of art…art will be like going to see a curiosity…Today man is on earth and these are all things that man has done while on earth, but do you think man will have time to produce art while travelling through the universe? He will travel through space and discover marvellous things, things so beautiful that things here—like art, will seem worthless…Man must free himself completely from the earth, only then will the direction that he will take in the future become clear. I believe in man’s intelligence—it is the only thing in which I believe, more so than in God, for me God is man’s intelligence—I am convinced that the man of the future will have a completely new world” (quoted in Lucio Fontana, exhibition catalogue, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1988, p. 36).